'Vlad' To Reimagine Dracula's Early Days [Updated]

Christmas has come early for those of you desperately wishing for just one more story about vampires. Heat Vision reports that the folks behind The Twilight Saga, Summit Entertainment, are putting together a project called Vlad, centering around the early years of Vlad the Impaler, who was the inspiration for the original Dracula myth.

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Plan B, aka Brad Pitt's production company, will be producing the film and Dede Gardner and Pitt are listed as co-producers. The script was penned by Charlie Hunnam, who we've seen as Jackson Teller on Sons of Anarchy on FX and the film will be directed by Anthony Mandler, who's done music videos for Eminem, Rihanna and The Killers. Collider tells us this will be an action-adventure film and that Summit was already developing the project but it got an energy boost when Mandler came on board.

No word on whether this film will dive into the gruesome acts that got the Vlad his infamous moniker. A main character that brutally kills dozens of people (at a time, I believe) would be pretty unusual for a Hollywood flick.

Update: Check out what Charley Hunnam had to say about the project:

As the script stands now, we don’t touch on vampirism. That was my one non-negotiable area when we were developing it, and thankfully, nobody suggested that we should delve into it at the end. But you can clearly see the things that Bram Stoker took…. Vlad was such a brutal man, and the trick is to make him sympathetic. That was the challenge, and if we’ve succeeded in any way in this script, I truly believe that it’s genuinely making him sympathetic...There are a million ways to show that this guy is the origin of vampirism without actually having him drinking blood.

Hunnam answers many more of the questions you may have about the Vlad script, but you'll have to jump over to Entertainment Weekly to read them.

Does anybody out there in cyberspace have any interest in a such a murderous and sadistic central character? American Psycho and Silence of the Lambs certainly did wonders for Christian Bale and Sir Anthony Hopkins.